The Hands ( and Hiccups) of Time

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.

Everyday I celebrate the beauty that is my wife, the mother of my child. But Mother’s Day make me remember my own mother, who is dead and gone. She would have been in her 102nd year. She was “gone” long before she actually died, he right stolen by the cruelty of dementia. Her dementia robbed her of the way to make the words vocal. Words that I imagine she wanted to say.

I have so many words I want to say.

She would often say,” You know why I’m here? I can’t remember shit.”

My dear mother left us with her mind trapped within her.  Still, there were those times, the precious moments, when she would gift me with an occasional laugh, what I took to be recognition. And with a conspiratorial wink, I knew in my heart that she was still in there, not completely lost, but struggling to get to the surface of her congested mind.

I was sitting in a room with my mother and brothers a week after my father died. My brother said something about my father passing away, and my mother, without missing a beat, said, "He didn't pass away.  He died.  He is dead and he died."

No candy coating it here.  And that was my mother in a moment, a perfect mother moment that was so matter of fact, yet so cold, so disimilar to everything else about her. And yet, like me, this duality of the warmth and the cold live together as one.

When it gets cold, my hands and toes are like icicles, popsicle toes I call them. My mother’s hands are more than cold. They are dead, cremated years ago to ashes, scattered in the restless sea with my Father’s ashes.

But I remember other times, not so long ago....

I remember her hands. Her warm worn hands. Her hands were very different than my fathers’ meaty hands.  Her hands were more like mine.  More like her own mother, my Nana, and also her father, who died before I was even born. Long, cold English fingers, descended from Huguenots, runaways from France, elegant, aristocratic hands, fingers that seemed destined to play the piano.

In the end, her hands were so soft, worn down and worn out from all the children, the laundry, the dishes, the endless cleaning that a house of seven children brought her.

I remember my hunger for her hands.  How I wanted and craved the caress of my mother, wanting, wanting, always waiting and wanting more.   Lying in bed with scarlet fever, chicken pox, or measles (both German and non-German) my head burning with fever, the bed spinning, the room coming in and out of focus. The kind gentle hands of my mother, cooling and soft, wiped my brow, brushed my cheek, and held my little hands.

How those same hands found me at age 49, when I had my heart attack. There she was by my bedside holding my hand, her once little boy now a grown man in a hospital bed.

Those were the hands of time, the hands of my mother and my father, both gone, both lost, both never to return.

Johnny Thunders says, "You can't put your arms around a memory", but sometimes you can get a hand in there, grasping for fingers, pulling up these memories from the dark pool of time.

I wrote those words back in 2018. There is still that vestigial pull of mother over mind that I will never escape. I’m not in any rush to go anywhere fast. I’m five years older, and presumably wiser. Certainly, I am not well rested. Last night was hiccup hell. Hiccups are a side effect of the chemo, and they did not stop, except for a a few brief moments, when sleep begrudgingly pulled me under. The thoughts in my head were definitely of the “I can’t go on” variety. But I did. I breathed. I hiccuped. I tried very hard not to think.

Do you ever try not to think? It’s pretty much impossible. Not that my brain was running through the Rolodex, with these nonstop hiccups, it was focused only on how to stop them long enough to get a few minutes of rest.

I read a post yesterday from a Facebook Friend. A Facebook Friend is usually a stranger, or someone you know very little about. Perhaps you don’t even really know them, but the platform affords them a resonance that is more than memory. In most cases, they could very well be a stranger. I don’t recall ever meeting this person, in fact, I’m not even sure why they came up on my feed.

Feed. That is a strange word for these manufactured memories. Faceboook is the feed bag. We accept and consume, cleaning our plate. Nonetheless, this new post came up, and since no one had commented on it, it was fresh. This person’s writing was so beautiful. She is a writer, singer, playwright, actress. She has been fighting Cancer for a few years now, at one point she felt victorious, but now, she was acknowledging that the cancer had returned, except to a different part of her body. Her post imparted a sense of resignation, and also an acceptance that while we fight the good fight, we can also sense the losing battle. She could see how it was playing out and it wasn’t good.

It was very sobering. As I fight this cancer, I can only be positive and refuse to allow myself to feel sorry for my condition. I can’t change it, I can only fight it.

I just finished week one of seven weeks. It is a short time in the big picture. Seven weeks. 49 days. 1176 hours. I can’t get caught up in the countdown, because I really need to get some sleep. But it is impossible to sleep while you are nonstop hiccuping. I am caught up in a loop of involuntary movements and sounds and sensations.

So I walked the dog at 4:21, and I changed her diaper, and I made coffee, and I made breakfast, because if I can’t sleep, I might as well eat. It is now 5:34, the hiccups “hiccing” like clockwork. The sun is up.

I can hear the air filter blowing air around the apartment, but it doesn’t drown out the hissing of my tinnitus. That also never goes away. I should take some comfort in this intransigence. The lack of change could be seen as perseverance, not as a sentence. So many sensations to remind me that I am part of the living. The hiccup. The acid in my stomach. The weariness in my brain.

Hold on soldier, this battle has barely begun. There is still 45 days left of treatment. And that is assuming everything will be good, and life will go on. But as my unknown Facebook friend reminds me, deadlines are always false. Temporary targets allow us to trick our tired minds, to push ourselves forward.

It’s been a long dark night. Hopefully, I will get some relief. I’m going to try acupuncture today. I remember a birthday card that my friend Bonnie/ Aisha gave me so many years ago. I was barely 20 and she was 16. It was a picture of a voodoo doll with many pins stuck in it. On the inside panel of the card it read, “Today I am feeling like a Scientist.”

Today I feel more like Pavlov’s dog, and less like the scientist.